The world is a bewildering place, most of the time. We wonder how other people can be so dumb and then we wonder how we could be so dumb. We look with cock-eyed gazes and tilted heads all around us at the things that just play out, seemingly as nature would insist that they must. Most everything can almost be predicted and that's what's so maddening, most of the time. It's easy to feel as if we'll never survive the irrationality of it all, but we still find ways to move from one day to the next. It happens mostly with the help of surrendering, with going a little battier ourselves, a little bit more every damned day. We find ourselves squinting more and more, trying to make out the substance that must be behind the crazed and agitated faces that we find staring us down with every passing moment.

Tim Foljahn, a Michigan-born, but New York-dwelling singer and songwriter, must find himself digging into the depths of passers-by, just by looking at them, casting lines but never aspersions on them - more giving them a context and a back-story, rather than denouncing their manners. He finds that those lost souls are so much more like him than he'd ever really want them to be, but there's nothing anyone can really do about it. If you're lost, you're lost and you'll follow lots of bread crumb and popcorn trails as long as it feels like you're getting somewhere, just so long as you wind up in someplace inhabited by the time the sun sets.

Foljahn sings, "How can I leave what's gone/Back where it belongs…/Show me the love we had/I can't tell the good from bad," on "Faded," from his newest solo album, "Songs For An Age Of Extinction." It's an ode to the things that have been there and gone, those forgotten and those just given up because there were no choices to be had. It's a song to the understanding that most everything is confusing and scrambled. There should be love for those wonderful accidents that felt great temporarily. There should be love for those things that reminded us what hurt was because then perhaps we could feel it as it's coming on the next time and some of the collateral could be diminished.

Or nothing would change and nothing would smooth out the bumpy ride. We're thinking that's the way it's going to shake, but all is well, as it's never going to last longer than we can or get to take. It will strike and it will linger and then retreat right when we can't feel it anymore.